Daily News Stuff 20 April 2026

• The memory shortage could last for years. (The Verge)
  
  16GB is the new 128GB, and you might as well get used to it:

  Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12 percent a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand. But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5 percent is planned.

  That's bad enough - projected growth will only fall further behind demand. But it gets worse:

  The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers. With the companies already prioritizing HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it's not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics.

  But it gets worser: HBM memory is stacked vertically just like AMD's 3D-Vcache. And exactly like AMD's 3D-Vcache it uses TSVs - though-silicon vias - to transfer the signals between the layers.
  
  And those TSVs take up about half the space on HBM chips, meaning the factories need to churn out twice as many wafers for the same amount of memory, when they already can't produce enough.

• But at least hard drives are still well, poop. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Toshiba is now offering refunds rather than warranty replacements because they don't have any stock to replace failed drives.
  
  
  
• Cloud hosting company Vercel - which is also the maintainer of the popular Next.js framework - got hacked. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Apparently Context.ai was hacked, which let the hackers compromise a Vercel employee's Google Workspace account, which allowed them to hack Vercel itself.
  
  This is what's known as a "supply chain" attack: If the target is too well secured, find something they use that isn't, and attack there instead.
  
  
  
• VitaLink is a keyboard with a 13" 4K touchscreen display. (Liliputing)
  
  It's not a computer though. It has two USB-C connections, one to act as a keyboard, one to act as a display.
  
  
  
• If you have unused PCIe slots that are unusable because they are blocked by your video card, the ArcherX is a solution. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's an adaptor for a single M.2 SSD that plugs into the slot and lies completely flat, which should probably not interfere with your video card. Maybe. Possibly.
  
  
  
• A wallaby ate my kangaroo paw.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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